The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
In a packet-switched system, such as a switch or a router, a plurality of counters and meters are used for traffic monitoring and bandwidth management. Some switching systems are distributed over several devices that are coupled together, however when packets subject to counting and metering are received and processed at multiple distributed devices within the system, determining a count and metering traffic for the packets becomes challenging.